Andrej Karpathy, director of artificial intelligence and Autopilot Vision at Tesla, has announced he is leaving the company.
In a statement on Twitter, Karpathy said, “It’s been a great pleasure to help Tesla towards its goals over the last five years and a difficult decision to part ways. In that time, Autopilot graduated from lane keeping to city streets and I look forward to seeing the exceptionally strong Autopilot team continue that momentum. I have no concrete plans for what’s next but look to spend more time revisiting my long-term passions around technical work in AI, open source and education.”
Stanford University graduate Karpathy was a research scientist and founding member at artificial intelligence developer OpenAI before joining Tesla in 2017.
Karpathy said it is, “Important to keep in mind that the Autopilot team is hundreds of strong engineers who very much know what they’re doing, just don’t have my public visibility. I was only one part of that effort and I think get an outsized spotlight cast on me because I do.”